Eye Eye, Your Highness

Following a proud family tradition, Prince William, or Doctor Wales as he’ll be known during his week as an ophthalmic surgeon, began his medical career today – with one small hiccup.

With all cameras trained on him, the future king attempted to slice cleanly through the trabecular meshwork of a patient’s eye, only to slip with his monogrammed, silver scalpel, tearing right through the Juxtacanalicular tissue adjacent to Schlemm’s canal, and ripping open no less than three of the four biggest retinal arteries.

“Yoink! That’s a crate of beer then,” quipped William, creasing up with laughter, as great spurts of blood gushed over the startled crowds who had come to cheer him on.

In accordance with medical tradition, the Prince must now buy drinks for his ten fellow interns.

In commiseration, his senior doctor, Doctor Ralf ‘Rats’ Rattenburg told him: “Good go, your royal majesty. One lad once took 16 goes before he got it right! Course, he was struck off and flayed alive for scalpel practice. Must not a’ been descended from mediaeval warlords, I guess, poor sod.”

The 25-year-old is on a one week placement at his own personal Royal Prince Hospital on an undisclosed tropical island where his grandfather, father and uncle, the Duke of York, also practiced.

It’s also the balmy paradise where, in July 1939, a young Princess Elizabeth first spotted a certain dashing naval officer named Philip, drunkenly removing a lung from one of the indigenous people of the island for “a bit of a wheeze” – that same Philip who eight years later, due to a ghastly clerical blunder, would become her husband...